Rankings ‘Don’t Matter’ To Utah Coach Until CFP Committee Meets

The Utah Utes take the field against the Idaho State Bengals in NCAA football in Salt Lake City on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019. (Ravell Call, Deseret News)

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – The Utah football team has entered the top 10 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, it’s the earliest that the Utes have been ranked in the top ten in school history, but that doesn’t matter to Utes head coach Kyle Whittingham.

The only other time that the Utes cracked the top 10 in the month of September was in 2015 when they were undefeated at the end of the month. In October, Utah played USC in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as the third ranked team in the country and lost to the Trojans.

The Pac-12 has half of their conference ranked in the latest AP poll with the Utes as the highest ranked team in the conference.

Now that Utah is in the top 10 again, head coach Kyle Whittingham doesn’t look at the rankings at this point in the season.

“I care about us, so it is nice to see that we are getting national recognition, but we just have to go through our schedule and play them all,” Whittingham said at his weekly press conference. “I don’t pay much attention to the rankings until you get about mid-year because you don’t have great perspective. That is probably why the College Football Playoff committee doesn’t start until mid-year because it takes some time to get things sorted out. At this point in the season though, to have six teams ranked, that is a positive for the conference.”

At this point in the season, the AP poll is the ranking that is used around college football. The College Football Playoff Committee will start gathering towards the end of October to determine their top 25 rankings and which teams are in and out of the Playoff race.

The Utes have appeared in the College Football Playoff rankings in 22 weeks since the CFP era began in 2014. That is the most times among Pac-12 schools.